We celebrate the breaking [of] laws every time the media canonizes Rosa Parks. She broke the law. There is no question of that. The question is whether it was the ethical thing to do (it was.) We celebrate the Nazi resistance, we celebrate the Tiananmen Square uprising. I’m sure those were all illegal actions, yet were unquestionably the moral things to do. So how would killing a killer, when all options are exhausted, not also be the right thing to do?

Think Progress: Matthew Yglesias writes, “Random murder of civilians in order to coerce political concessions doesn’t have a great track-record. But direct action terrorist violence against abortion providers has, I think, proven to be a fairly successful tactic.”

Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What’s more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.

Washington Post: Ezra Klein writes, “If a woman cannot get an abortion because no nearby providers are willing to assume the risk of performing it, the actual outcome is precisely the same as if the procedure were illegal.”

Roeder has, in all likelihood, made abortion less accessible. It would be, in my view, a perfectly appropriate response for the Congress to decisively prove his action not only ineffectual, but, in a broad sense, counterproductive.

That’s not to suggest fast-tracking legislation that radically transforms the county’s uneasy consensus. But there are plenty of remedies that speak to the question of access alone: Bills that make abortion centers safer and help poor women afford treatment, for instance. We can’t stop Scott Roeder from killing George Tiller. But we can stop him from having his intended effect on a woman’s ability to choose.

National Review: Robert George writes, “Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence.”

Hullabaloo: Digby writes that “the murder of Dr Tiller in a demented defense of a ‘culture of life’ should be all it takes for everyone to see that this is not the simple, straightforward issue they’d like to believe it is. And once you recognize that it’s a unique circumstance in which the moral boundaries are blurry and indistinct, the only possible course is to trust the person with the most knowledge of the circumstances, the symbiotic relationship to the fetus and greatest stake in the outcome — the woman.”

I mean, if I believed that a guy working in an office down the street was murdering innocent and defenseless human beings every day, and the governing authorities repeatedly refused to intervene on behalf of the victims, I might feel compelled to do something about it, perhaps even something unreasonable and irresponsible. Wouldn’t you?

This is the radicalizing logic of pro-life rhetoric. Which brings me to my question for pro-lifers: Who is the better, truer member of your movement? The man who murdered serial “baby killer” George Tiller? Or Robert George and other (comparative) moderates, who reject the use of violence to save the innocent?

On every issue we have studied, from abortion to immigration, a well-refined progressive narrative, designed to speak to the hearts and minds of the American people in their language, not the language of activists and advocates, can beat the strongest of conservative messages nationally by 15-20 points. Even in the Deep South, where I live, we can win by strong double digits with common sense, center-left messages on issues such as abortion.

There is no reason for progressives or Democrats to play defense on these issues. We should be playing offense, putting Republican ideologues on the ropes, where they are used to having Democrats.

I was the director of community affairs when one of the clinics I worked with in metropolitan D.C. (which provided contraception NOT abortion) was bombed in the middle of the night. I remember only too well how violated we felt, how shocked the staff were, the staff who felt they had to quit their jobs after the bombing. My heart and prayers are with the people who are going to work at clinics this morning. I imagine they all feel a little less safe. I hope you’ll reach out to the providers in your community with your support. And that regardless of your position on abortion, you’ll speak out against violence.
Rev. Debra Haffner//debrahaffner.blogspot.com

Your headline is an abomination. This enabling of the “moral murder” claim by even the “liberal” New York Times ensures that cold-blooded, murdering psychopaths like Roeder, and in publishing the incitement to murder more abortion providers from the likes of RedState wothout comment, is journalistic malpractice.

Do you similarly publish exhortations to bomb US government buildings or murder government officials by extreme anti-war groups, for example? No, you don’t.

Furthermore, you never find time to publish tales like this, which suggest that Tiller was anything but a “baby killer”:

” In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.

We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. ”

Your constant capitulation to the threats and propaganda of the right wing in search of “balance” for which these extremists will never give you credit is one of the primary reasons your paper will soon cease to exist. And, as long as you treat incitement to murder fellow American citizens as worthy of this type of uncritical coverage, I say good riddance.

I don’t know why I should have been shocked, but I WAS shocked by the number of people, including recognized media commentators, who gloated–or came near to gloating–over this murder.
It hadn’t quite come home to me until now just how many fanatics there are re. this issue. Their mindset is identical to that of The Taliban, and if they somehow got control of government, their form of rule–totalitarian theocracy–would also be identical.
I’ve done a lot of research over the years, and I have yet to find even one instance of a pro-choice supporter murdering a pro-life activist. No, murderers spring exclusively from the ranks of the pro-life movement.
Yeah, that’s sure pro-life, isn’t it?
This brainwashed rabble claims to take its authority from the Bible. Setting aside for the moment whether or not scripture actually, specifically prohibits abortion, my reaction is: IT’S NOTHING MORE THAN A BOOK!
No rational persons who can think for themselves–truly the definition of what it means to be human–would ever blindly obey instructions from a book–which was written thousands of years ago, by the way, when most people (including the authors) were far more ignorant than they are today–or from an authority figure who claims he/she is getting instructions directly from “God”.
That there are so many among us who “think” exactly in such a primitive way is truly frightening.

10 children lost their grandfather, 4 children lost their father, a women was widowed, a community lost a tremendous civil servant, and countless women who have to face the unimaginable choice of having to abort their child to save their lives,

Scott Roeder is a terrorist, no different from his brothers in iraq who bomb mosques, and then the cemeteries where they are burying the victims of the bombing.

there is no excuse for murder.
the late dr. tiller was not a murderer.

my heart and prayers go out to his family, and all the lives he touched and served.

The great irony is that late-term abortions are provided only for medical reasons, and frequently done in order to preserve the mother’s fertility so that after the procedure she can try again to conceive a healthy child. People who are sure that each fetus is a person seem not to know that a certain percentages of fetuses have such genetic or developmental abnormalities that they wouldn’t be able to survive for an hour outside the womb. Do these “pro-lifers” really want women to bear a fetus that has developed without a face? Or a head?

10 children lost their grandfather, 4 children lost their father, a women was widowed, a community lost a tremendous civil servant, and countless women who have to face the unimaginable choice of having to abort their child to save their lives, lost someone who fought for them.

Scott Roeder is a terrorist, no different from his brothers in iraq who bomb mosques, and then the cemeteries where they are burying the victims of the bombing.

there is no excuse for murder.
the late dr. tiller was not a murderer.

my heart and prayers go out to his family, and all the lives he touched and served.

The so-called wars in Iraq and Afganistan have killed more innocents than Dr. Tiller and all other physicians performing legal abortions combined. I guess that makes George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their compatriots fair game for well meaning avengers.

‘Was Dr. Tiller’s homacide a ‘moral’ homacide?’ Erich Etheridge asks…
Frankly, this seems to me an innappropriate question.
In reading the June 1st. edition of ‘wnd.com’, an (allegedly), ‘prolife’ as well as, (allegedly), ‘Christian’ website, I noticed that the ‘Daily Reader’s poll’, which focused on Dr. Tiller’s execution by a ‘person of religion’, has over 200 respondants who praised this murderer.
That is a reason to pass ‘hate crimes’ legislation, because as reprehensible as a simple murder was/is, to do so in the name of ANY Deity makes the crime worse by ‘orders-of-magnitude’.
Shame on the NYT’s for phrasing this argument as if to ask about some nonexistant ‘claim of morality’ in this pseudo-pius act.
I want Obama to bring these fools to justice, and I most definetly want all ‘people of religion’ who can’t keep their hands & theology to themselves suppressed, wether an Osama Bin Ladin/Francis Cardinal Law on one end of the monstrosity scale or a sociopathic believer on the low end.
Those of us who DON’T wish to be involved in the petty fake morality foolishness so in vogue these days have a right to be able to ignore these nutty, intolerant people without having to be armed like a storm trooper!

Roeder is a terrorist, pure and simple. And Red State and the other conservative organs quoted here are terrorist sympathizers. They should just rename themselvs Al Qaeda in America and be done with it, because they’re cheering on the same kind of violent, immoral, loathsome behavior that they condemned elsewhere.

If we use the wingnuts’ own logic, Roeder should be waterboarded until he talks (plus a few more for good measure; say, 183). There may be a ticking time bomb in a doctor’s office somewhere set to go off within the next 24 hours, and our law enforcement needs to know where it is.

It’s extremely disingenuous to imply that the RedState quote is attributable to that web site. It was made in the comments section by what appears to be an unaffiliated person. The actual article posted at RedState (on which this comment was made) condemns the shooting: “It is entirely the wrong thing to do though, achieves nothing to save lives, and must be prosecuted vigorously.”

How many of your bloggers who think late-term abortions are ethical, have actually seen a full-term (or almost full-term) baby exhumed from their mother’s uterus, wrapped in plastic and literally thrown away? When you’re a witness to this you know in your heart it’s immoral. Reading about this procedure or discussing it definitely does not tell the story.

If you believe in the infallibility of the Bible, then you cannot deny that a fetus does not have a soul and is not a human. God thought it so important that men know this, that he detailed it in the first book of the bible, Genesis:

“God created man [Heb., Adam] in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Adam was absolutely the first man whom God created. He was formed out of the dust of the earth (and hence his name), and God breathed into this nostrils the breath of life, and gave him dominion over all the lower creatures (Gen. 1:26; 2:7).

It also says that when the breath of life was breathed into Adam, only then did he have a soul. Thus a fetus cannot be human until it takes its first breath. Only humans have souls.

The anti-abortion crowd just hasn’t read their scripture and are following false prophets.

The very title of this piece illustrates the moral idiocy of the anti-abortion groups — they are perfectly willing to sacrifice living human beings in favor of individual fertilized cells which have no more moral significance than a skin cell which, with the help of modern science, has the same potential to become a human being if given the right cloning treatments.

Unfortunately, the anti-abortionists are correct–if they murder doctors and pregnant women, the number of people seeking abortions will go down.

The reality is that this killer was exactly like an islamic suicide bomber; the religious fanatics told him that Dr. Tiller was a “mass murder comitting genocide” in a “death camp.” Roederer, if that’s his name, believed it and was incited to do something about it.

The Operation Rescues and the Bill O’Reillys should be prosecuted. They are not practicing free speech, they are yelling fire in a crowded theater, causing people to believe there is a fire, and causing a stampede that results in death. It is time for the justice dept to prosecute operation rescue and the like. This country’s anti-abortionists are our American Taliban, and they are willing to kill and die for what they believe. Your choices are a) join them, b) speak out and fight against them, or c) do nothing.

How dare you publish a supposed discussion of any death under a headline such as this? Even to publish such a headline gives credence to the entirely indefensible idea of ‘moral murder.’ And by inference promulgates the unproven — and unprovable — conclusion that all fetuses are living, no matter what the state of development.

If you didn’t already wish to state that the New York Times is anti-choice, you just screwed up, big time.

What was the intention — reasonable discussion? titillation? throwing a bone to the slavering hounds of the conservative wing of the Republican party, a sub-group whose ever-intensifying fanaticism is overshadowed only by its ignorance?

For shame, New York Times. I thought you were above this brand of shoddy sensationalism.